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Friday, March 7, 2014

value zig zag {all finished}

So, I did it again - stayed way too long last night basting and quilting my Value Zig Zag like there is no tomorrow :)

I quilted it on my Juki and while it was not a horrible experience it was quite challenging, to say the least. It's a pretty large quilt (72" x 72") and since I decided to back it with minky this thing weights a ton. Plus, this was the first time I gave a continuous eight FMQ pattern a try. I practiced loops on smaller quilts a while back but once this guy was under the machine I decided eights would be better than loops and I went for it.

The quilting is far from perfect, but it will do for now. I'm really glad I finally had enough courage to give it a try. There was a lot of maneuvering and pulling going on the whole time I quilted and consequently my right arm feels like it might fall off any minute but who needs two good arms when there's a new quilt to be admired, right?

I used only scraps for this quilt and the array of patterns and colors is fantastic. This quilt has it all, from flowers and geometrics to skulls, cars, deer, bears, turtles, letters, ... :)

I was so very tempted to use either black or gray binding (definitely my go to colors) for this quilt but at the end I went with this blue/ white stripe. I thing it makes for such a happy binding.

I followed Katy's value quilt tutorial and used 5" squares (leftover charm packs work great) to make my blocks. And then I came across this amazingly fantastic method for trimming them. I hope you'll pop in and have a look, this method saved me tons of time and made trimming my blocks a breeze.

And now we have three large, scrappy, minky backed quilts for our family room (the other two are Scrappy Celebration and Economy Block). I hope my kids no longer have to fight over who gets to snuggle in the softest quilt. Three kids, three very snuggly quilts. Perfect if you ask me :)

Thanks for reading this very long post. Hope you all have an amazing weekend. Svetlana

41 comments:

Your quilt looks great. I have been practicing on my Juki and it's harder than it looks to keep consistent stitches. I want to rip everything out. Do you have any tips for the free motion quilting you did? Yours looks so nice.

Gorgeous! One thing that I really like about scrap quilts is that even though the fabrics are scrappy and seem random, they are still a representation of our stash and I feel like I could have picked this out as your quilt just from the colors. Did you piece the minky for the backing? I have never pieced minky, how difficult was it to piece?

This is a gorgeous finish! I love the blue binding and minky back together. Your kids are lucky to each have their own to snuggle under. Great job on the figure 8 quilting. It looks perfect to me and I'm sure that's no easy feat with a minky back.